Raymond Chobaz: Cultural barbarians at the UF gate

Sunday

Jun 28, 2009 at 12:01 AM

As a stronghold of what can still be called "culture," Classic 89 has fulfilled its mission well. But for how much longer?

By Raymond ChobazSpecial to The Sun

"How blessed we are with all that great music, that mostly non-verbal source of inspiration on WUFT-FM!" This was my thought on a recent flight from Salt Lake City. Listening to the University of Utah's now exclusively news and talk-show station, KUER-FM, I asked myself: How many times a day a sound and mindful person could possibly want to expose him or herself to the continual bombardment of carefully censored and edited half-truths? Even excellent news programs by NPR or the BBC become stale after several repetitions. Silly talk shows beyond description fill in the rest. In the evening, some sound diversions are offered that are indistinguishable from the unfathomable number of commercial radio stations.Coincidentally, UF President Machen was the head of that university when the fateful restructuring of its formerly classical music station occurred. The (business) world has finally succeeded to dictate its unimaginative world view on the University of Utah. But it has not yet come to that at the University of Florida; or so I thought.Then I became aware of John Moran's (and supposedly others') bulimic "information-hungry" disorder (Speaking Out, April 26) and UF's all too compliant radio reorganization announcement (June 5). Having experienced first-hand the inclinations of our government, school boards and boards of trustees, I know that the position of our policy makers serves a directive that does neither encourage reverence for the old nor sympathy for tradition. Instead, it shows a ferocious appetite for the blatantly inauthentic and unoriginal.With the cutting down of our last classical music programs at institutions that should be responsible bastions for our great cultural heritage, goes the closing of our cultural legacy in general. Call it "restructuring" or "reorganization," they are nothing but politically correct euphemisms for cultural genocide.Under the pretext of a recession, art curriculums are being cut, teachers dismissed and staff let go. This should be a matter of great concern since the loss of knowledge and experience is removing us further and further from the enduring qualities that are inherent in great art. The accountability for living in a society with little love of art, but with high demands for titillation, rests ultimately on our educational institutions. One would think that such places would stand their ground and know that in matters of art (and religion) questions are neither resolved by "majority vote" nor by statistical "answers" of hypocritical questionnaires.It makes one wonder where a society stands that so easily dispenses of the essence that ultimately defines its own humanity. Once it is removed and its access denied, what could possibly be the alternative to true art? It can only be the cheap!Insensitivity towards genuine art can only lead to its dismissal. What is soon left is the fragmentary, the alienating absence of a sense of the whole. Art, real art, has the ability to sustain the life of a wounded humanity. Take it away and you lose a vital, regenerative force. We are experiencing a subordination of culture, in particular at universities, to the interests of nouveau-riche economic moguls. Their way of thinking is so self-servingly myopic that it can no longer perceive and comprehend real quality as such unless it is presented to them in perversely quantified forms of numbers and statistics.The lethal "supply and demand" credo infecting our campuses has been shamelessly implemented by boards of "trustees" and bonus receiving CEOs watchfully planted by politicians answering to the need and greed of Big Business. Our universities, once places of genuine learning, are now leaning towards becoming nothing more than empty temples of a degenerate, market-based world view that dwells on manipulation, speculation and opportunism. Education, I believe, should lead to a full life and not into a spiritual cul de sac and that its priority should be the refinement of understanding through knowledge and experience of cultural history to make informed and nuanced judgment possible. Education should mean the development in the individual of a free and creative spirit, not the state's subordination of education to its own ends under pressure and coercion of a corporate lobby. It is regrettable that students today no longer expect of an educational institution that it will assist them to develop their minds and intuition in freedom from all prejudice and constraint but that it will provide them — as quickly as possible — with a passport to material success and social preferment.Have we meekly accepted the fact that the "tyranny of the moment" has already replaced the true person of culture and alleviated society from the demanding labor of acquiring culture?As a stronghold of what can still be called "culture," Classic 89 has fulfilled its mission well by daring to play music whose natural lifespan has a propensity of being a good deal longer than that of a mayfly. Its quality music program has fostered a high example and, ironically enough, a very important part of a fashionably propagated diversity. Knowing the existing academic aversion to the word "classic," I doubt that it will retain that label of quality as its trade mark. Then again, the short-lived talk shows and other instantaneous self-expressions on the "latest" and the "hottest," as experienced on the University of Utah's prime radio station, do not deserve that honor. Yes, we can always turn that dial off. The quietness may make us take note of things that all this hip clamor of perpetual, verbal diarrhea tends—and intends—to tune out.Raymond Chobaz is director of the University of Florida Symphony Orchestra and conductor emeritus of the Gainesville Chamber Orchestra.